New MERS virus spreads easily, ‘deadlier than SARS’

LONDON — A mysterious new respiratory virus that originated in the Middle East spreads easily between people and appears deadlier than SARS, doctors said on Wednesday.

More than 60 cases of what is now called MERS, including 38 deaths, have been recorded by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the past year, mostly in Saudi Arabia.

So far, illnesses have not spread as quickly as SARS did in 2003, ultimately triggering a global outbreak that killed about 800 people.

An international team of doctors investigated nearly two dozen cases in eastern Saudi Arabia. In a worrying finding, they said MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) not only spreads easily between people, but within hospitals. That was also the case with SARS, a distant relative of the new virus.

“To me, this felt a lot like SARS did,” said Dr Trish Perl, a senior hospital epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, who was part of the team. Their report was published online on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. “In the right circumstances, the spread could be explosive,” he added, while emphasising that the team only had a snapshot of one MERS cluster in Saudi Arabia.

Cases have continued to trickle in, and there appears to be an ongoing outbreak in Saudi Arabia. MERS cases have also been reported in Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Tunisia. Most have had a direct connection to the Middle East region.

In the Saudi cluster that was investigated, certain patients infected many more people than would be expected, Dr Perl said. During SARS, such patients were known as “superspreaders” and effectively seeded outbreaks in numerous countries.

He and his colleagues also concluded that symptoms of both diseases are similar, with an initial fever and cough that may last for a few days before pneumonia develops.

But MERS appears far more lethal. Compared to SARS’ 8 per cent death rate, the fatality rate for MERS in the Saudi outbreak was about 65 per cent, though the experts could be missing mild cases that might skew the figures.

While SARS was traced to bats before jumping to humans via civet cats, the source of the MERS virus remains a mystery. It is most closely related to a bat virus though some experts suspect people may be getting sick from animals like camels or goats. Another hypothesis is that infected bats may be contaminating foods like dates, commonly harvested and eaten in Saudi Arabia.

“As long as it is around, it has every opportunity at the genetic roulette table to turn into something more dangerous,” said Dr Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.

At a meeting this weekend in Cairo, WHO will meet with other experts to discuss MERS and to possibly develop guidelines for next month’s Ramadan, when millions of Muslim pilgrims will be visiting Saudi Arabia. AP

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